The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy

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Respect for the idea of the rule of law is “the heart and centre of our system of government” but “is absolutely under threat”, including in Russia, China, the US and the UK. “Newspaper articles describing British judges as the enemies of the people quite recently in the context of Brexit was a dreadful moment.” ‘Halcyon days’ But what most troubled me about the book - and I see it happening on the news today - is that a random decision of injustice can take just a matter of weeks to be conducted, but it takes decades to undo. The Chagossians were deported from their homeland in a matter of months after the UK made a decision to do so in the 1960s, but it has taken international law until 2019 to redress this. And 4 years on, only a few UN institutions have redressed this. Google maps still mentions the Island as belonging to the UK.

I think it transformed the perceptions of the judges who felt she is not some distant theoretical account, this is real, about real people today.”I still believe law can make a difference. I’ve had enough positive moments. I worry about the state of the world, the state of Europe, the state of the UK and yet, in the long run, I’m curiously optimistic.” In conclusion it is clear from his book, and the parts where Sands expresses a personal opinion, that his concern for liberty and the rights of the individual is limited to those parts of the Chagossian archipelago that do not include Diego Garcia. Perhaps the sentiments expressed (again in Sands’s book) by the Crawley Chagossian exiles about being allowed to work at the US base, will be some tiny recompense. I think not Every literary festival stays in an author’s mind for slightly individual reasons. I shall remember the Oxford festival for: BIOT was created in the 1960s as a useful fiction. The Chagos Archipelago originally formed part of the British island colony of Mauritius, some 1,300 miles to the west. As Mauritius sought independence, Britain set out to detach Chagos from the colony’s administrative jurisdiction. Keeping it separate was important so that one of the archipelago’s islands, Diego Garcia, could effectively be leased to the United States for use as a major military base. Britain was in the process of a military withdrawal “east of Suez”; the U.S. was moving in, and Diego Garcia offered a strategic location. To make the detachment from Mauritius look legitimate in international eyes, Britain claimed, falsely, that the islands were populated only by transient “contract labourers” and that, as a result, no vexing issues of self-determination were involved. Sands: “my hope is that the two countries will enter into a long term strategic relationship, one that maintains the US base at Diego Garcia” (150)

But the most compelling moments belong to Madame Elysé. Unable to read or write, she prepared a pre-recorded statement that was projected on large screens. ‘After [she] finished there was a long silence, as powerful as the words, then the sounds of tears,’ Sands relates. A stimulating and rewarding on-stage conversation; a lively informed and tolerant audience; privileged access to the great treasures of the Bodleian, and finally, wonderfully interesting dinner companions to help me conclude the best day I have enjoyed at any festival – anywhere. I have never been attracted to international law and war crimes tribunals due to both the above truisms. Those guilty of “Crimes against humanity” are only the military personnel of the country that lost a war and never the victorious military personnel. Victims are only victims, from a Western European perspective, if they are white. Powerful countries, the previous “winners,” only atone for their sins if it is politically and militarily convenient. These are all, unfortunately, major points in Philippe Sands’ book, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage, chronicling the legal arguments of Chogossian refugees who were forcibly relocated from an archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean to make way for a military base that has been leased by the British to the U.S.A. since the early 70’s. This base contains much of the U.S.A.’s early response capabilities to any conflict in the Middle East. Pre-positioned ships are always ready for a war and a mere few days from potential hotspots. Call the forced relocation what it is: A move by two powerful countries, Britain and the U.S.A., who had both ostensibly renounced colonialism, to continue behaving like colonialists in spite of numerous decisions in international courts which, over the last decades, gradually favor the rights of indigenous peoples.

Looking to the future, he says: “I think the heart of the question in the Irish context is going to be the will of the people. The Good Friday [Belfast] Agreement reflects a commitment to allow the will of the people to prevail and once the will of the people in the expression of the right of self-determination indicates that they wish for there to be a united Ireland, it will happen.” Sands was in the group that landed on Peros Banhos; so was Liseby Elysé, along with five other islanders, the first exiles to set foot on the beaches of their homeland for half a century. On the island they came across a tarnished metal plaque signed by the “BIOT commissioner’s representative” engraved with the age-old landowner’s and colonialist’s mantra, that “trespassers will be prosecuted”. As Sands’s book makes clear, and despite Britain’s shameful intractability, there is now not a judge in all the world to uphold that threat. Ultimately, the case boils down to what judges in the Great Hall of Justice decide, scenes painted with insightful detail. Before we reach that point, Sands explores other key cases. In 1966, Liberia and Ethiopia sought ‘to hold South Africa to account for its racial mistreatment of the inhabitants of South West Africa’ (Namibia) and ‘its refusal to allow the former British colony to become an independent country’. Despite The UN General Assembly adopting resolution 1514, which proclaimed a principle of ‘territorial integrity’, the International Court of Justice ruled that ‘Ethiopia and Liberia had no right to come to court to hold South Africa to account’. As Sands observes: ‘In the era of decolonisation, the judges were seen to strike a blow for colonial rule, leaving apartheid and discrimination in place’. Leading international lawyer Professor Philippe Sands tells the story of the legal fight against the forcible expulsion of the people of the Chagos Islands by the British, of its impact on people who were forced to leave their homes, and the historic struggle for justice.